Zephire.8049

Can't say I'm enthused to repeat content where the doing it the first time was the most interesting simply because I didn't know what would happen. The rewards are mediocre right now and I'm not going to grind content I'm indifferent about on the off-chance the gated rewards are something I'm interested in. With the masteries being locked as well, it feels like there's no point to doing DRMs repeatedly because it's wasted XP. But what puts me off the most and has put off most people I've talked to is the utter lack in communication. The story suddenly stopping would have been fine if Anet had simply said that they're going back to how LW1 unfolded and that the community needs to build up supplies/allies between the parts of the story. Instead nothing was said about it, there was no clear indication that there was no way to proceed, and the community event wasn't mentioned anywhere and the in-game notification was collapsed by default. If a game can't respect its players' time by clearly communicating that they're changing up how things have been done for years, it's kind of demoralizing even when the content that you're expected to run isn't boring as heck.

I've also been kicked twice in the past 30 minutes. First time it took 25 minutes to get back in, and was kicked after 5 of that. I've also been talking to someone else on Discord and they've experienced the same thing at the same time. I was in Drizzlewood and I think they were in a city, so it's definitely not IBS5 instances only.

They removed elementalist auras because they were "too distracting" but those auras were nothing compared to what we have now. With the exception of combo fields, there's no reason why any player needs to actually see the weapon/skill effects of another player if they don't want to. It's actually hard to impossible to see combo fields now because there's so many effects going on over them which results in them being far less engaging. Boss tells are also impossible to see when you literally cannot see their model. Also model culling does not prioritize bosses so even if you turn model culling on to the highest setting for performance reasons, there's no small chance that the boss' model will be invisible anyway. (And then there's the Madusa's gaze ability where the eye is literally too high to see on some models so you have no idea when you should look away to avoid being frozen...) "We don't want you to play the interface" falls rather flat when, if you're melee, the only way to see that you're in melee range and hitting a boss is to look at your auto-attack skill and see if the boss is in range or not because there are so many weapon and skill effects going off on top of the large, particle effect laden skins that you cannot see what your character is doing. Honestly, at this point I tend to just range auto-attack on bosses because I can't see anything going on in melee range and there's too many mechanics that insta-down you where it's impossible to see when to dodge. My DPS is less than it would be otherwise but my QoL skyrockets when I can actually see the occasional tell or avoid a poison/fire field instead of dying to it and having to run back from a waypoint all because there was no way to see it through all the frivolous effects.

Instead of waypoints, they may utilize shrines (Siren's Landing being an example of a map with one WP but there being 4 other shrines to teleport to). That said, Asura weren't present in Elona either but we still got Waypoints and Dragonfall showed us that waypoints are mobile, so while Cantha may not have the tech currently, as soon as we show up they gain access to it because it's ready to go and can be placed where needed. Tie it to story progression and you have lore reasons for why there are WPs.